Jeff Koons

I wrote most of the first two sections of this essay (Part 1) in March 2011, but never submitted it anywhere. I think I lost interest in the subject. I thought I wrote it well before the negative critiques would surely come rolling in, even before Koons’s retrospective at the Whitney in 2014.

Shiny on the outside, hollow on the inside. That is how the work of the American artist, Jeff Koons, has been generally described and received, not only by those who are less than affectionate toward it but also by those who like it.

As we hunker down in anticipation of what will almost certainly be a less dramatic snowstorm than some are predicting, and begin to formulate plans for the construction of snowpersons that will immediately follow, we offer you this brief and necessarily incomplete survey of artists’ snowmen for inspiration.

A second sculpture by Jeff Koons is conspicuously absent from his retrospective at the Centre Pompidou after a photographer’s widow complained to the art star and the museum’s administration that “Naked” (1988) constituted copyright infringement.

The exhibitions that rippled through our cultural fabric over the past year, at least those occurring in and around New York, have registered the predictable number of highs and lows, though 2014 did manage to plumb one nadir unlikely to be matched for a good long time.

This week in art news: a Mexican museum’s Yayoi Kusama retrospective is mobbed, Tate must reveal the details of BP sponsorship, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts picks up a trove of Constructivist photographs.